COVID has fundamentally changed the way that companies are thinking about their customer experiences and where they believe they need to be in Digital maturity. This happens when you have to quickly pivot to the Digital channel from retail and phone channels to serve your customers.
One of the biggest challenges with a Digital transformation is knowing where to begin. Should you start with cleaning up your Company’s data? Should you dive right into updating Digital journeys on your website? Should you implement a new customer experience platform like Adobe or Salesforce?
The answer is likely yes, yes and yes; however, the time frames for these different efforts likely have different horizons.
For the Company’s data, you face the issue of garbage in, garbage out. This type of clean up can take years. However, in many cases the fastest path to solving this dilemma is a parallel path of cleaning up old databases – long term, while at the same time creating a new middleware layer of data built on modern architecture and pulling from the old systems – shorter term. This will allow you to leverage more modern personalization software without having to wait for a “big bang” data solution.
When it comes to Digital customer experiences, prioritization here is also important. Where are your customers biggest pain points or highest volumes of transactions? This is where you’ll want to start. You’ll want to smartly design these experiences utilizing customer and organizational input and build them in an agile way to get to market more quickly. Once in market, you can measure and adjust. It’s not about getting it perfect at launch, but instead launching well informed experiences quickly and adapting them over time.
For a large implementation like Adobe or Salesforce, this is also a major investment of resources and time. These modern platforms are the fastest path to being able to more smartly target prospects and customers with the right marketing or service messages to create raving fans for your brand. These implementations can go wrong when people believe it’s a matter of plug and play. Here too, you need to prioritize around what will be the most important journeys and experiences you want to address for your customers. By establishing clear use cases, you can work with your software partners to activate the right elements of their solution to generate the greatest return from your investment.
In the end, a major Digital transformation has many elements to it. I have laid out a few of the major ones, but this is far from exhaustive. The key is to figure how to prioritize the most important efforts, data, and solutions to generate the greatest return in the fastest time frame. Digital transformation isn’t a destination, it will be a journey that is unending, so get started now and prioritize your efforts.
@Scott McAllister - I remember when the first Lumascape came out in 2011. It blew my mind. I was overwhelmed (there were only 150 martech vendors at the time). Fast forward today and it looks more like a map of the world with 8,000 martech vendors. It's no wonder why CMOs and CTOs are pulling their hair out. How does any company make sure that there's no leaky bucket and duplication of resources within the various parts of the company?
Great point - this will have to be a part of the transformation for certain.
Though I hadn't talked about security, this is a bedrock of Digital Transformation and Corporate strategy given it can painfully impact stakeholders and brands.
What I've typically seen is these roles being filled by people with deep expertise in the space and rolling into the CIO given it deals with the technical infrastructure of the firm.
Great post @Scott McAllister. I read an article the other day about companies dealing with unprecedented cyber attacks with workers WFH during COVID-19. How do companies mitigate that? If WFH becomes the new normal, does this digital transformation include a plan for worker's home office?